Timothy Leary:

An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center

Creator

Leary, Timothy, 1920-1996

Title

Timothy Leary Collection
1963-1973

Dates:

1963-1973

Extent

.5 box

Abstract:

This collection includes correspondence, manuscript fragments,
and legal documents related primarily to the publication of Leary's writings,
especially
The Politics of Ecstasy. Other items
include several letters written in Algeria and Switzerland after Leary's 1970
escape from prison.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin

Timothy Francis Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October
22, 1920, and grew up as an only child in an Irish Catholic household. His
father Timothy was a U.S. Army captain and his mother Abigail was a
teacher.

Leary attended a number of educational institutions, including Holy
Cross College (1938-39), the U.S. Military Academy (1940-41), and the
University of Alabama where he earned his B.A. in 1943 while serving in the
Army. He received his M.S. degree from Washington State University in 1946.
Leary continued his intellectual pursuits at the University of California at
Berkeley where, in 1950, he received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

After graduating from Berkeley, Leary stayed on as an assistant
professor from 1950-55. He left this position to become director of clinical
research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland,
California, where he stayed until 1958. In 1959, Leary was appointed as a
lecturer at Harvard University. During this period Leary introduced psilocybin
to a number of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Peter
Orlovsky, and Williams S. Burroughs. He also administered psilocybin to
colleagues, students, and inmate volunteers finding that it was useful in the
treatment of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and other psycho-physiological
disorders. By 1963 Harvard, faced with controversy as a result of Leary's
activities, dismissed him along with his colleague Richard Alpert.

After their dismissal from Harvard, Leary and Alpert founded a
privately-financed research group in Mexico, called the International
Foundation for Internal Freedom, to study and promote the use of LSD. However,
the Mexican government soon closed them down and in August 1963, Leary moved
his operation to a donated four-thousand-acre estate with a sixty-four-room
mansion in Millbrook, near Poughkeepsie, New York.

From as early as 1962 until 1970, Leary had been arrested and
incarcerated on drug-related charges in Mexico, British West Indies, Texas, New
York, Michigan, and California. In April 1966, the Millbrook estate was raided
by local police, led by G. Gordon Liddy then of the Dutchess County Sheriff's
Department, and four people, including Leary, were arrested for possession of
drugs. Following his arrest, Leary, to avoid constant harassment, founded the
League for Spiritual Discovery which was a religious movement that sought
constitutional protection for the right to take LSD as a sacramental
substance.

In 1970, after being sentenced to ten years imprisonment in California
to be served consecutively, not concurrently, with a Texas sentence, Leary was
immediately sent to a minimum security prison near San Luis Obispo, California.
However, by mid-September, Leary's third wife Rosemary, in conjunction with the
radical Weathermen group, arranged for Leary's escape from prison. He was
spirited to Algeria with his wife by the Weathermen, where they were granted
political asylum; he details this experience in his book
Jailnotes (1970). He and Rosemary took up
residence in Algiers with fugitive Eldrige Cleaver and Cleaver's exiled Black
Panther Party. By February 1971, a rift had developed between Cleaver and
Leary, supposedly engineered by the FBI, so Leary left Algeria for Switzerland
where he spent eighteen months before eventually arriving in Afghanistan.

In early 1973, Leary was kidnapped at gun point in Afghanistan by
American agents. They brought him to California where he was found guilty of
prison escape. He spent three more years in twenty nine jails in California's
prison system. He was released on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown.

Once Leary was released from prison in 1976, he spent most of his time
at his home in Beverly Hills and on the campus lecture circuit where he took on
a new role as a promoter of space colonization and life extension through
scientific research to retard the aging process. Leary's activities during the
late seventies included the formation of a cooperative to colonize space called
Starseed and in 1982 he toured on a debate circuit with his former nemesis G.
Gordon Liddy.

In 1995 Leary learned that he had inoperable cancer. He died amongst
friends on May 31, 1996 at his home in Beverly Hills. On April 22, 1997,
Leary's ashes were launched into space along with the ashes of 23 others, from
Grand Canary Island off the Moroccan coast.

Ditlea, Steve.
"Leary's Final Trip, the Web, Realized Multimedia
Vision,"
The New York Times
CyberTimes,http://www.nytimes.com (originally published 1996 June
1).

The Timothy Leary Collection documents Leary's relationship with his
editor William Targ as it developed around
The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary's editing
style as illustrated by his annotation of previously published articles and
lectures he was preparing as chapters in
The Politics of Ecstasy, and Leary's
attitudes towards a variety of issues, including the use of psychedelic drugs
as a means for expanding one's consciousness, articulated through
interviews.

The collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts, printed
material, galley proofs, illustrations, notes, and contracts relating to
Leary's publication
The Politics of Ecstasy in addition to other
works dating 1963-1973. The material is organized into two series: I.
The Politics of Ecstasy, 1967-68, 1971 (.25
box) which includes correspondence, published articles, notes, unpublished
remarks, illustrations, a press release, and a contract all related to Leary's
publication of the same name, and II. Other Writings, Correspondence, and
Interviews, 1963-64, 1966, 1971, 1973 (.25 box) which includes galley proofs,
published and unpublished works, interviews with Leary, correspondence, and
contracts related to works other than
The Politics of Ecstasy.

Correspondence in
The Politics of Ecstasy series is arranged
into outgoing and incoming files; all outgoing correspondence was authored by
Leary and all incoming correspondence was authored by Leary's editor William
Targ. Manuscript material includes annotated chapters, working chapter titles,
unpublished remarks by Allen Ginsberg, and illustrations with captions supplied
by Leary. The chapter numbers supplied by Leary do not reflect the numbering
used in the final version of the
Politics of Ecstasy. These chapters include
articles, lectures, and interviews Leary reworked for his book. A photocopy of
unpublished prefatory remarks by Allen Ginsberg, dated September 12, 1968, were
too late for use in
The Politics of Ecstasy according to a
comment written in pencil on the first page in an unidentified hand; these
remarks are annotated and signed by Ginsberg (also photocopied). The
illustrations are annotated by Leary and appear as part of Chapter 1,
"The Seven Tongues of God." The G.P. Putnam's
Sons press release contains quotes about
The Politics of Ecstasy supplied by Viva and
Allen Ginsberg, and the contract is between Leary and G.P. Putnam's Sons for
Ex-Static Essays, later renamed
The Politics of Ecstasy.

The Other Writings, Correspondence, and Interviews series contains
materials related to other works Leary was involved with, correspondence
unrelated to
The Politics of Ecstasy, published
interviews in which Leary was the interviewee, and contracts. Works include the
galley proofs for
Confessions of a Hope Fiend, an annotated
introduction and subject headings for David Solomon's
LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, a
copy of an article Leary wrote with Walter Houston Clark, and a typed
manuscript titled
"Footnote for Chapter 1" which outlines the
legal troubles that Leary, his third wife Rosemary, and his daughter Susan and
son Jack from his first marriage, experienced beginning in 1962. Correspondence
contains one letter Leary wrote from Millbrook, New York while heading up the
Castalia Foundation, and several letters from Algeria and Switzerland after his
escape from prison in California. Interviews with Leary include a 1966
interview which appeared in
Ave Maria. This interview explores Leary's
formation of a new religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery (L.S.D.), the
faith's credo "turn on, tune in, drop out," and the
issues involved in using LSD as a sacrament. Also included is a fragment of an
interview, from an unidentified source, which took place at the Millbrook
estate; according to the foreword, the house was closed because Leary and
members of the League for Spiritual Discovery were living in the woods and a
portion of this interview seeks to clarify why Leary, and others, made this
lifestyle choice. The two contracts seek permission to reprint Leary's works in
two publications by David Solomon.